Michael Henry Wilson had an immutable love of movies, and his work testified to his relentless desire to occupy the middle zone between fantasy and history. Wilson favored American cinema, probably because it’s the one that most perfectly fulfilled the aspirations of his writing: to paint on a broad canvas yet with minute strokes.

With his tests and patterns, his stimulants and digressions, Resnais attempts to describe the shape of the human soul, that irreducible bundle of sorrows, ecstasies, and longings that no amount of labwork can corrode.